Monday, March 23, 2009

- Now it should be possible to save high-resolution images even on low-end graphics cards (the program internally renders a mosaic of many 256x256 pixel image tiles and assembles them in standard RAM so the graphics card as such should not overloaded at any moment).

- The program no longer crashes when loading old scenes with Lara_Wetsuit model (rather than Lara_WetSuit), it's case insensitive now.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

In this my first article I will talk about the XNA Lara program created by Dusan Pavlicek.This program allows you to move the characters, enemies and the weapons' bones/model of Tomb Raider: Underworld in real time.

The author keeps updating the program almost every day and it is currently in the version 3.3; we have to thank him about it. So far, we have these models: Lara ( With Jungle Shorts, Jungle Pants, Jungle Heavy, Casual, Wetsuit, Drysuit and Snow Heavy outfits), Zip, Alister, Winston, Natla (with and without wings), doppelganger, Amanda (with her two outfits), Amelia and the Ship's Mercenary. It has the enemy models too: two tigers and the Mayan Thrall. When it comes to weapons, there are: Excalibur, Thor's Hammer and the mercenary's AK Rifle. There is also the motorcycle, the dummy (which you can make custom camera targets) and the Tomb Raider: Legend's Croft Manor Main Hall.

It has some features too, such as setting background color, assigning background images, display textures, display the wireframe, display bones, or remove them. It has also lighting parameters and camera parameters, and adjust the scale of the models, which I found very useful.

Lara and the doppelganger can use the pistols in hands or in holsters, but only Lara can use Thor's Gear and its glow.

The program also allows you to move all the 3D models and there can be various characters in the same scene. The scenes can be saved, so as the single model poses. Images can be also saved with or without the alpha channel (transparency).